What a
difference just one man-or one woman- can make! The supreme
exemplification of which is presented by Our Lord and Savior Jesus
Christ and His sinless Mother. Were it not for them none of us
would have the slightest inkling of just how high is the destiny to
which we have been called. Nor would the fulfillment of that destiny
lie within our grasp.

As we lower our gaze to a level of effort and achievement that is
merely human, a whole parade of names comes easily to mind. From the
ancient world Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar and the first
Christian emperor Constantine, all three of whom gave to western
civilization a new direction and shape. So, too, in the
twentieth century the indomitable Winston Churchill, armed simply with
a courage that was fierce and an eloquence beyond compare and rejecting
any and all proposals for accommodation with Hitler's Reich, stood
alone with his countrymen in their fortress of freedom off the dark
shores of Europe for a full year and a half, defended only by
the heroic bravery of the youthful pilots of Britain's Royal Air
Force, until Germany's invasion of Russia, followed six months
later by Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor, led to the formation of the
coalition that would smash the Third Reich. Had it not been for
Churchill's defiance, England itself, the indispensable staging ground
for a major invasion of the Continent, might well have capitulated
early in the War.

And, on the dark side, the
capacity of one single individual to inflict misery and death upon
millions of victims is dismally exemplified in Hitler himself, as in
his competitors in evil, Lenin and Stalin and Mao Tse-Dung.

For more
uplifting examples of the power for good that a single individual can
bring to bear we can turn to the world of science and invention and
geographic exploration; of mathematics and speculative thought; of
music, literature, art and religion. Pages could he filled just with
the names of those from whom we have gained new understanding, new
inspiration and new horizons. To cite but a few such pioneers in
benefaction there are Einstein and Edison, Pasteur and
Salk; Marconi and the Brothers Wright; Socrates, Plato and Aristotle;
Augustine. and Aquinas; Homer, Vergil, Dante, and Shakespeare;
Michaelangelo and Bemini; Palestrina and Handel, Bach and Mozart,
Bethhoven and Brahms; Columbus and Magellan; St. Francis of Assisi and
St. Joan of Arc, Mother Teresa, and Pope John Paul the Great. Indeed the benefactions
of that holy and charismatic pontiff were lavished not just on one but
on two worlds: the world of religion and that of politics, joining as
he did with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to bring down the
Soviet Empire.

Worthy of
inclusion in any roster of humanity's important benefactors is an
American who died just a few days ago, on September the twelfth, at the
age of ninety-five: Norman Borlaug. For his immense contribution
to expanding the world's food supply, through the devising of new
strains of wheat, rice and other cereal grains that combine resistance
to disease and adaptability to many climates with amazingly high
yields, he is rightly hailed as the Father of the Green Revolution,
the biogenetic revolution that allowed the production of food on a
scale that could free mankind from the scourge of famine, if only the
ambition and cruelty, the stupidity and greed of so many of the Third
World's leaders did not obstruct the implementation of what science can
provide.

Dr. Borlaug (who received his graduate education at the University of
Minnesota) is worthy of the tributes that throughout the world have
commemorated his passing. For his epitaph Christ's words at the
Judgment would serve very well: "I was hungry and you
gave Me food ."

From among those many tributes in my opinion one of the best is the
following homage from Gregg Easterbrook, an editor of The Atlantic magazine-to which may
I append a footnote of my own: how many other individuals whom God has
endowed with uniquely great gifts for the benefit of man have been lost
through the "unspeakable crime" of abortion, with the slaughter thus
far, in the U.S.A. alone, of some fifty million children. Fifty million
and counting.

Norman Borlaug-arguably the Greatest American of the 20th
century--died late Saturday [September 12] after 95 richly accomplished
years. The. very personification of human goodness, Bortaug saved more
lives than anyone who has ever lived. He was America's Albert
Schweitzer: a brilliant man who forsook privilege and riches in order
to help the ~ Pastor's Page: September 26 Ih , and 27h the
dispossessed of distant lands. That this great man and benefactor to
humanity died little known in his own country speaks volumes about the
superficiality of modern American culture.

Born in 1914 in rural Cresco, Iowa, where he was educated in a one-room
schoolhouse, Borlaug won The Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work
ending the India- Pakistan food shortage of the mid-1960s. He spent most of his
life in impoverished nations, patiently teaching poor farmers in India,
Mexico, South America, Africa and elsewhere the Green Revolution
agricultural techniques that have prevented the global famines widely
predicted when the world population began to skyrocket following World
War II.

In 1999, the Atlantic Monthly
estimated that Borlaug's
efforts--combined with those of the many developing-world
agriculture-extension agents he trained and the crop-research
facilities he founded in poor nations-saved the lives of one
billion human beings.

As a young agronomist, Bortaug helped develop
some of the principles of Green Revolution agriculture on which the
world now relies-including hybrid crops (selectively bred for vigor) as
well as "shuttle breeding," a technique for accelerating the
movement of disease immunity between
strains of crops. He also helped develop cereals that were insensitive
to the numbers of hours of light in a day, and could therefore be grown
in many climates.

Green
Revolution techniques caused both RELIABLE harvests and spectacular
OUTPUT. From the Civil War through the Dust Bowl, the typical American
farm produced about 24 bushels of corn per acre, by 2006, the figure
was about 155 bushels per acre.

Hoping to
spread high-yield agriculture to the world's poor, in 1943
Borlaug moved to rural Mexico to establish an agricultural research
station, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Borlaug's little
research station became the International Maize and Wheat Center, known
by its Spanish abbreviation CIMMYT, that is now one of the globe's most
important agricultural study facilities. At CIMMYT, Borlaug developed
the high-yield, low-pestieide "dwarf" wheat upon which a substantial
portion of the world's population now depends for sustenance.

In 1950,
as Borlaug began his work in earnest, the world produced 692
MILLION tons of grain for 2.2 billion people. By 1992, with Borlaug's
concepts common, production was 1. 9 BILLION tons of grain for 5.6
billion men and women: 2.8 times the food for 2.2 times the
people.
GLOBAL GRAIN YIELDS MORE THAN DOUBLED during the period, from half a
ton per acre to 1.1 tons; yields of rice and other foodstuffs improved
similarly. Hunger declined in sync: from 1965 to 2005, global per
capita food consumption rose to 2,798 calories daily from 2,063,
with
most of the increase in developing nations. In 2006, the United
Nations
Food and Agriculture Organization declared that malnutrition stands "at
the lowest level in human history," despite the global population
having
trebled in a single century.

In the
mid-1960s, India and Pakistan were exceptions to the trend
toward more efficient food production; subsistence cultivation
of rice
remained the rule, and famine struck. In 1965, Borlaug arranged
for a
convoy of 35 trucks to carry high-yield seeds from CIMMYT to a Los
Angeles dock for shipment to India and Pakistan. He and a coterie of
Mexican assistants accompanied the seeds. They arrived to discover that
war
had broken out between the two nations. Sometimes working
within
sight of artillery flashes, Borlaug and his assistants sowed the
subcontinent's first crop of high-yield grain. Paul Ehrlich gained
celebrity for his 1968 book "The Population Bomb," in which he claimed
that global starvation was inevitable for the 1970s and it was "a
fantasy" that India would "ever" feed itself Instead, WITHIN THREE
YEARS of Borlaug's arrival, Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat
production; WITHIN SIX YEARS, India was self-sufficient in the
production of all cereals.

After his triumph in India and Pakistan and his Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug
turned to raising crops' yields in other poor nations-especially
in Africa, the one place in the world where population is rising
faster
than farm production and the last outpost of
subsistence agriculture.
At that point BORLAUG BECAME THE TARGET OF CRITICS who denounced him
because Green Revolution farming requires some pesticide and lots
of fertilizer. Trendy environmentalism was catching on, and affluent
environmentalists began to say it was "inappropriate" for AFRICANS to
have tractors or to use modern farming techniques. Borlaug told me a
decade ago that most Western environmentalists "have never experienced
the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from
comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just
one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50
years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation
canals and be outraged that FASHIONABLE ELITISTS in wealthy nations
were trying to DENY them these things."

Environmentalist
criticism of Borlaug and his work was puzzling on two
fronts. First,absent
high-yield agriculture, the world would by now
be
deforested. The 1950 global grain output of 692 million tons and
the
2006 output of 2.3 billion tons came from about the same number of
acres-three times as much food using little additional
land.

"Without
high-yield agriculture," Borlaug said, "increases in food
out-put would have been realized through drastic expansion of
acres
under cultivation, losses of pristine land a hundred times greater than
all losses to urban and suburban expansion." Environmentalist
criticism
was doubly puzzling because in almost every developing nation where
high-yield agriculture has been introduced, population growth has
slowed....

In the late
1980s, when even the World Bank cut funding for
developing-world agricultural improvement, Borlaug turned for support
to Ryoichi Sasakawa, a maverick Japanese industrialist. Sasakawa
funded
his high-yield programs in a few African nations and, predictably, the
programs succeeded. The final
triumph of Bortaug's life came three years ago when the Rockefeller
Foundation, in conjunction with the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, announced a major expansion of high-yield agriculture
throughout Africa. As he approached his 90s, Bortaug "retired"
to
teaching agronomy at Texas A& M, where he urged students
to live in
the developing world and serve the poor.

Often it is said America lacks heroes who can provide constructive
examples to the young. Here was such a hero.
Yet though streets and buildings are named for Norman Borlaug
throughout the developing world, most Americans don't
even know his name. [Emphasis added throughout].